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Chapter 15
A Barrel of Laughs
“MaxChaos? As cook? Are you out of your mind? He’s a walking disaster! Do you want the whole crew to come down with food poisoning? And if he doesn’t poison us, he’ll set the ship on fire! Who else can we get?”
SilverCloud became the captain of The Frabjous Joy only recently, but she’s been a sailor long enough to know that you can’t always get what you want; but if you try sometimes; well you might find; you get what you need!
What she needs right now is to have her freighter ready so that it can sail on the high tide later this afternoon. That’s a tall order, because today is Saturday. Cargo vessels don’t usually set sail during the weekends, and the docks are generally quiet with very few workers on site. The normal crowd of misfits hanging around looking for casual work, is simply not here today.
On a Saturday the whole of Lancaster city centre is buzzing with the merchants, the markets, and most of the population focussed almost entirely on shopping! Whatever produce is available in the local area is almost certainly on sale across the various street markets and retailers today. On a Saturday people can buy all manner of clothing, linens and household goods, fruits and vegetables, fresh meat and game, rabbit and pheasant and the like, and even live goats and live chickens.
And butter! On a Saturday people can buy butter! And cheese, and sugar, and flour, and all sorts of sweet and savoury things.
This is the special day of the week for Franklin. The paper was printed and distributed on Friday. On Saturday Faraday and NutJob are left to churn out the comic books which are due at the shops before Thursday morning. Now Franklin can relax. For her, Saturday is baking day and the only question is what sort of cakes or fancies is she going to bake today? Not only that, she has to buy the ingredients and have all of the baking finished before “OpenMike Night” starts at 19:00 this evening.
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